David sat down on his bed for a minute, feeling as if he had escaped from some distant nightmare that had vaguely threatened to come near him. Then, very sensibly, running away from it instead of thinking about it, he began to dress in a great hurry. He washed his hands over again, went on rubbing his hair, did anything to occupy himself. In a few minutes Bags came in dressed from his dormitory next door, but David had no voluble conversation on hand, as he had half an hour ago in the fives-court, and continued dressing in silence. Bags tried a few amiable topics, but got no more response than grunts and monosyllables, which were quite unlike David’s usually rampageous loquacity. After three or four thwarted attempts it was borne in upon his lucid mind that there was something the matter. “What’s up, Blazes?” he inquired. “Nothing. Why?” said David savagely. “Oh, I don’t know. You haven’t got as much to say as usual.” “Well, who wants to talk to a chap like you?” asked David, getting his tie in a knot, and venting himself in irritation. Bags felt slightly hurt, for he was unaware how he could have caused this, but since David did not want to talk to “a chap like him,” the most rudimentary sense of self-respect forbade the “chap like him” to make any further overtures. David cracked his nail over his collar-stud, failed to get any sort of parting in his hair, and broke a bootlace. These material adversities somehow sobered him, and he began faintly to see that really Bags had nothing to do with his own mood. “Sorry, Bags,” he said at length, having tied the ends of the broken bootlace together. Bags was the most amiable of mankind, and besides, this was David. “Right oh,” he said at once. “But do tell me what’s up, if I can be of any use.” “Good old Bags, but you can’t; thanks awfully. Don’t ask me anything about it, if you don’t mind.” Suddenly the fact of the parcel at the lodge which he had forgotten to bring down for Maddox presented itself. He felt that he couldn’t see Maddox again just at once. “I say, there is one thing you might do,” he said. “I wish you’d come up to college with me, and get that parcel of Maddox’s. I should be frightfully obliged if you would. I’m going to tea with a fellow there, and I should have to go up and down twice.” Bags felt that, if David offered this as an explanation of his ill-humour, it was a pretty thin one. “Oh, is that all you’re so sick about?” he asked. David’s irritability returned. “All right, don’t come then,” he said. David was ready by now, and without another word he marched to the door. He would have to bring the parcel up himself, but he was determined to get somebody else to take it to Maddox’s study. “Wait a second,” said Bags in a slightly injured tone. “Of course I’ll come up with you.” David took his arm. “You are a brick,” he said. “But don’t ask me anything more. It isn’t anything. I expect I’ve made a fool of myself.”